Discursive Boundary-Making and Contested Legitimacy: A Multicultural Center in Vernacular Publics

This study examines how organizational legitimacy is contested in vernacular publics by focusing on Saaga, a municipally funded multicultural center in Kouvola, Finland. Using the discourse–historical approach (DHA), it analyzes online forum discussions alongside municipal and media texts that offered institutional framings but were largely revoiced and inverted in the vernacular debate. The analysis identifies nine boundary-making logics, grouped into ontological instability, moral economy, and symbolic–material order. Through rhetorical and affective strategies—such as parody, irony, nostalgic comparison, and fiscal misrepresentation—Saaga was recast as being fictive, corrupt, undeserving, or misplaced. Rather than rejecting multiculturalism outright, publics mobilized notions of fairness, efficiency, and common sense to re-signify inclusion as being wasteful or elitist. This study reveals how legitimacy is unraveled in everyday discourse, with ridicule, resentment, and sarcasm operating as tools of delegitimation. It contributes to legitimacy research by foregrounding vernacular publics as agents of discursive boundary-making, to multiculturalism research by showing how civic organizations materialize cultural ideologies and become condensation symbols in public discourse, and to discourse methodology by extending DHA into irony-rich online arenas. It also highlights the symbolic vulnerability of multicultural institutions in the context of demographic decline and political polarization.